Case Study: Palo Alto Unified School District prevents student data breaches with Yubico's YubiKey authentication

Palo Alto Unified School District protects student data with YubiKeys

Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), a top-ranked K–12 district in California serving about 12,000 students, faced a data breach when student grade information was exposed on a third-party website after a teacher’s credentials were compromised. The district’s IT team invoked its breach response protocol, investigated scope and vectors, and needed a stronger, easy-to-use authentication solution to secure staff access to sensitive student and family data.

PAUSD partnered with Yubico to deploy more than 3,000 YubiKey 5 Series devices—using the YubiKey 5Ci to address iOS compatibility—and pre-provisioned keys for a mandatory staff rollout. The hardware-based authentication now prevents account breaches, protects student information and parent data, is cost-effective to deploy and maintain, and has led to daily YubiKey use by all staff and growing adoption among parents for other WebAuthn/FIDO2 services.

Palo Alto Unified School District